Bill Murray's Blog, page 137

Friday Photo Quiz #188

The photo from Minsk in the previous post leads naturally to this week’s photo quiz. Below are six former Soviet capitals. How many can you name? Click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answers are, from the top: 1. Yerevan, Armenia 2. Baku, Azerbaijan 3. Minsk, Belarus 4. Tallinn, Estonia 5. Tbilisi, Georgia 6. Riga, Latvia.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

Oswald in Minsk

Peer Savodnik writes in The Interloper that, in his quest to defect to the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald claimed to have secrets about the American U-2 spy plane, but that after a time Moscow officials decided Oswald wasn’t as valuable as he claimed and sent him off to Minsk. David Stern summarizes Oswald’s life there in Minsk’s fond memories of Lee Harvey Oswald on the BBC website. He writes:

“The KGB however wasn’t impressed and initially rejected his application, but on the day his tourist visa expired Oswald slashed one of his wrists. Fearing an international incident if he tried again, the Soviet authorities let him stay.

They sent him to Minsk, a distant provincial capital, which might as well have been Siberia. He was assigned a job at a radio and TV factory, and allocated a one-room apartment in the city centre.”

From a 2010 visit to Belarus, here is the apartment building in which Oswald lived. The lady who took me there said he lived on the right side of the building as we look at it, on the third floor.

Sochi Olympic Watch #19

From a report by Boris Nemtsov, former reformist mayor of Nizhny Novgorod and thorn in the Kremlin’s side forever:

“The Sochi Olympics has gone down in history before it has opened: it is the most expensive Olympics in the history of humankind. With over $50 billion already spent, it is more expensive than the sports buildings of all the other winter Olympics combined, and there have already been 21 of them.”

That fun little tidbit appeared in The Interpreter magazine, which looks like it ought to ride up to the top of everybody’s bookmarks during the Sochi Olympics. Why, just today its lead story is Sochi Migration Service Catching Journalists. “As she was holding a tape recorder, Lukyanova attracted the attentions of officials….” the article explains. It’s no good for journalists to hold tape recorders on advance of the Olympics, as we all know.

More Bells, Whistles, Hoopla, Bargains and Free Stuff

The Kindle edition of Visiting Chernobyl is now available on Amazon. It hardly costs a thing, just $3.99. To celebrate birthing another book, I’ve sale-priced the Kindle edition of my first book, Common Sense and Whiskey, at $3.99. And if you buy the paperback edition of Common Sense and Whiskey (listed at $8.99), you can download the Kindle edition for free.

Hope you enjoy them, and thank you. Please share your feedback.

The next book is Visiting Easter Island, tentatively due in the spring. You can read the first chapter at the end of Visiting Chernobyl.

To get the Kindle edition of Common Sense and Whiskey for free, look for this graphic:

Friday Photo Quiz #187

All the photos in this week’s quiz are from this country’s capital city. Can you guess the country? Click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is …………………………………….. it’s Panama City, Panama. The bottom two photos are from the old town, Casco Viejo.

There are larger versions of these and a few more photos in the Panama Gallery at Earthphotos.com.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

Sochi Olympics Watch #18

It’s just about game time. Under a hundred days. The Olympic flame is up in space without the flame. Good feelings are firmly in place, in a sort of former Soviet way. Just ask the Norwegian TV crew that was stopped by authorities on their pre-Olympics publicity tour. Six times.

Then there was that bus bombing.

Remember all those other winter Olympics? Vancouver, Lillehammer, Nagano, the cute little ones that cost in the low billions?

This one will cost over 50 billion dollars, more than any summer games, and where did all that money go? Can’t find most of it. Surprise!

Those old ones were all full of good feeling and snowmen and not a peep about jailing gay people. This one will be full of snow, even if they have to use last year’s. As to jailing gay people, let’s see. Everybody’s gonna talk about it.

But it’s okay. Y’all come, have a good time. Me and my boys is cool.

 

 

Friday Photo Quiz #186

Tough one.

Clue: The mountain is actually in a different country. Extra credit for naming the mountain and the country it’s in. Extra extra credit for naming the lake behind the man.

That’s the capital city at bottom. Can you guess the country? Click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is …………………………………….. it’s Armenia.

That’s Mt. Ararat in the top photo, which is just across the border in southeastern Turkey. The lake is Lake Sevan, Armenia’s largest, and the capital city is Yerevan.

There are much larger versions of these and a few more photos in the Armenia Gallery at Earthphotos.com.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

Visiting Chernobyl

The book version is now live on Amazon. The ebook is due in a few days. In the next few days we’ll be bundling my first book, Common Sense and Whiskey, so if you buy the book, you’ll get the electronic version of CS&W free. And we’ll be giving away the electronic version of Visiting Chernobyl. Yep, free downloads, on select individual days between now and the end of the year. Hope you enjoy all this new reading. Scroll a little bit and read chapter one of Visiting Chernobyl just below.

Visiting Chernobyl Excerpt: Chapter One

1 KINDERGARTEN

The fence fell over itself, a cascade of wooden slats. It was hard to tell with everything covered by snow, but probably the trees between here and the building grew up since the accident. Down the road radiation signs stuck out of long earthen mounds.

This was Kopachi village, not far inside the ten kilometer inner zone around Chernobyl. They �buried Kopachi, almost the whole village. Maybe that was a good idea in desperate days, but burying things forced radioactive material toward the water table. So once they thought twice they stopped burying to think things through.

At first they’d bury villages whole, especially across the border in Belarus. They’d dig pits, push entire houses in and cover them up. Special trucks, who knows where they came from, sprayed water up and down the streets all the time, because all the dust that burying kicked up was radioactive.

Belarus buried more than a hundred villages. Conscripts sent down here by Minsk did it. They filled up all the wells they could find with concrete trying to protect ground water.

It’s only ten miles (16 kilometers) from reactor 4 to Belarus, and on April 26th, 1986 the wind blew straight to the border. That meant between half and two thirds of all the radiation fell on �Belarusian farmers who lived on whatever produce they coaxed from the soil, and on the family livestock.

Authorities moved over a hundred thousand Belarusians in a hurry, to places with no housing and little employment. Twenty per cent of Belarus’s agricultural land was rendered useless.

Ten years on, farmers could breed horses and cattle for beef but not for milk, and 32,000 square miles, the area of South Carolina, remained too radioactive to use. That’s nearly a quarter of the country.

•••••

They commissioned studies and they anguished and eventually they worked out how to bury things more safely. They’d dig a pit and before they pushed anything in they’d line the bottom and sides with four feet of clay. Then they’d bury the �bad stuff, seal up the top with clay and add soil and grass.

It was better than that mad bulldozing they did at first. One thing though, still today they have to keep trees off the mounds. Roots make the crypts leak.

They left two buildings in Kopachi, I don’t know why. Ice lurked up under the snow, you knew it, so you crept along step by step. Bum place to slip and get hauled out to Kyiv in the militia’s ambulance up at the checkpoint. �You had to bat away tree branches to get up the walk to the kindergarten. Nobody here to chop them down. Rose bushes intruded as prickly hazards up the walk. There were no foot prints, so nobody had been here since the newly fallen snow, a day or two. Icicles hung from the window frames. No glass.

Igor held his dosimeter to the ground. 6.04 microSieverts per hour.

The kindergarten in Kopachi was a solid old thing, a brick building with four columns, fading blue paint around the wood of the windows. All over the floor papers were scattered about, workbooks with activities, kid stuff like coloring and matching similar objects.

Somebody had brought a little metal tricycle with a metal seat inside, its rubber tires gone. A spoon sat on a low table and a green poster board, I think a science project, was propped up against the wall �behind it. You had to skirt a charred spot in the floor where somebody once set a fire.

A cabinet, a tea cup, a grown-up’s coffee mug. A stuffed bear leaned back, propped against a chalkboard on the little tray where the chalk would be.

Three narrow wooden doors hung crooked, kind of defiant, open and upright. Cabinets listed down at the end of the hall. Somebody had spilled their insides out all over the floor, a pretty pointless thing to do. A bottle of glue sat alone on a shelf. A tree poked right through the window. �Down the corridor bunk beds filled up a whole room, cloth safety nets around the top bunks. The original 1986 covers and pillows. They must have been. Who’d smuggle in soiled blankets?

Paint peeled in palm-of-your-hand sized slices. A children’s book was titled Barvinok. In Ukrainian that’s ‘periwinkle.’

Two girl dolls, one in long johns, the other barefoot in a pinafore, lay on one bed’s lower frame. Snow piled up on the trees. One window still had glass.�People had posed things for pictures: a book opened to a particular page on a window sill, gas masks on the floor. After 27 years this wasn’t April 1986. People had been here. Workers brought in for the clean-up effort for example (they called them ‘liquidators’), took whatever they needed wherever they found it. Families came back now and again to salvage what they could of their own things. And Kyiv let contracts to salvage scrap metal, resulting in ripped out window frames and pipes.

And the looting. Igor lamented “bad people,” and he was so innocent, such a wide eyed academic, that you thought along with him, “Yeah, those bad, bad people.” Igor had no guile. He always called it “OUR government” like a boy scout. He was utterly unaffected and you had to love him.

The government cracked down hard on the looting. You didn’t want radioactive teddy bears finding their way to Kyiv after all, or hot batteries driving around in cars. �The kindergarten wasn’t exactly a freeze frame of April 26th, 1986, but little girls’ dolls, 80s style tricycles and rusted cribs in the school? They’ll still get to you, 27 years on.

•••••

Hoopla, Bargains and Free Stuff

To go along with publication of Visiting Chernobyl (in the next few days), we’ll be dropping the price of the print edition of Common Sense and Whiskey and for a time, bundling it with a free Kindle edition; buy the print book, get both. And once Visiting Chernobyl is available in both formats we’ll give away the Kindle edition of Common Sense and Whiskey for free on select days next month. Stay tuned.